The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Wednesday, February 01, 2017

Ratf*ck 2017: Our Murrow Moment

I’m doing some video and text work for Sibel Edmond’s
Newsbud.Visit the site and support
them.Please!And read my article about the TPP and NAFTA!The
TPP Is Now Deader Than Ever Thanks to Trump.Double please! Recommend it to your friends!

We’re now in the “Murrow moment” phase of liberal journalism
i.e. journos thirsting to take down Trump, you know, just like Ed Murrow took
down big bad Joe McCarthy back in the day.

There is a certain desperate energy to do a Murrow moment on
Trump.Now that Trump got elected, it seems
the #NeverTrump media is kicking itself for not doing more to turn the juicy but dubious Steele
dossier on Trump’s Russia links into a pre-election firestorm.

Time to make amends! And make up for the lost time!

The strategy pretty much boils down to Accentuate the negative / Eliminate the positive / Don't mess with
Mister In-Between all day every day.

Warning: Winning the news cycle against Trump each and every
day may cause some regrettable slippage in journo standards.

Like making a complete hash out of the history of NAFTA in
order to employ it as a Trump-bashing weapon.That’s what I cover in my Newsbud piece on Trump and TPP, and journos getting history on rewrite to whitewash the political and economic catastrophes NAFTA inflicted on Mexico in the 1990s.

I’m a fan of leaks and investigative journalism.I’m not a fan of skewed reporting designed to
take down a public figure, a.k.a. advocacy journalism an exercise which, when not conducted by the parfait
knights of the American Fourth Estate is known as agitprop/infowar/*gulp* fake news. Or ratf*cking.

I’ve lived long enough
to fart through silk by Mencius’ standard, and I’ve seen enough ratf*cking
to be skeptical of the process by which journos demagogue a demagogue.Didn’t see McCarthy, but I saw Nixon.And Khomeini and Gaddafi and Saddam and Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un and Putin
and Assad and Chavez and, of course, Trump.

“Burn the witch!” reporting seems better suited to
generating moral panics and stampeding public opinion toward a pre-ordained
outcome, rather than generating that reasoned focus and debate that, you know,
might keep us out of a trillion dollar war in Iraq.

My skepticism is also grounded on the backstory behind the
original “Murrow moment”.The takedown
of McCarthy is celebrated as the ultimate journo righteous kill—and the model
and justification for subsequent exercises in advocacy journalism-- but it
wasn’t quite a clean hit.

Long story short, journos did not speak truth to power in
1954; they piped agitprop to the people on behalf of a systematic campaign to
86 McCarthy orchestrated by President Eisenhower.

If your preferred method for studying history is George
Clooney movies, you might find something new here.

The ethical issues involved in overtly going after a pol with
one-sided reporting because he was “a threat to the republic” did receive an
airing at the time of the Murrow telecast.

Fred Friendly, Murrow’s associate, was quite frank about the
fact that to get McCarthy, they needed to do a hit piece on him, as described
in this excerpt from Friendlyvision: Fred
Friendly and the Rise and Fall of Television Journalism by Ralph Engelman
(Columbia University Press, 2011).Friendly
is not at all frank about the key role Eisenhower played in the campaign
against McCarthy, perhaps out of solicitude to Ike, who became a significant
CBS news partner after leaving the presidency.Ah, journoism!:

Engelman writes:

“A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy” is a sophisticated hybrid
of two genres: objective reportage and public argument.The opening suggest the conventions of
journalistic objectivity…Murrow “trails the Senator like a Greek chorus”…linking
and interpreting the sequences…Visual clues reinforce the underlying message…In
a departure from normal documentary technique, the camera lingers beyond the
conventional edit at the end of the statement to reveal awkward or unsavory
imagery…some commentators…criticized the program as a dangerous precedent for
the use of the powerful visual medium of television for advocacy journalism…Friendly
did not dispute the one-sidedness of the program, recalling that he and Murrow
were aware that they had “crossed the line into editorial comment”…Reflecting
upon the McCarthy program two decades later, Friendly characterized it as an
exception to the general rule that broadcast journalists should avoid taking
sides.Under extraordinary extenuating
circumstances, “where the future of the republic is involved,” an exception can
and should be made…Friendly argued that See
It Now could legitimately present for public consideration a critique of a
senator who had skillfully used for his own ends a press—print and electronic—that
reflexively reported his charges without routinely examining their veracity:

And in the final
analysis, what if we hadn’t done the broadcast?And supposing McCarthy had triumphed, as he might well have, then where would…those
who criticized the broadcast be?...I think we were balancing how what we knew
how to do well against what he did superbly well, which is to be a demagogue.And I’m sorry we had to do it that way. But
it was the challenge of a lifetime, a desperate moment for the country, and not
to have used it because of a series of rules that we would apply to ourselves
and that Senator McCarthy would abuse to the ultimate would have made history
judge us very harshly.

Endquote

The legendary See It
Now episode is embedded in my 2015 McCarthy/Trump post, so viewers can judge for themselves.

Subsequently, according to Engelman, CBS jefe Bill Paley
sidestepped the whole advocacy issue by saying the news programs don’t
editorialize but feature or documentary programs did and in those cases CBS
delegated responsibility for content and opinon to those “in whose integrity
and devotion to democratic principles CBS reposes complete confidence…” and who
are “bound by the overriding policies of fairness and balance”.

So you can see where this is heading.The criteria is “where the future of the
republic is involved” and the decisionmakers are journos with “integrity and
devotion to democratic principles” and “bound by the overriding policies of
fairness and balance”.

Who will police the journos blah blah blah.Especially now that Eisenhower’s dead and can’t
share his moral compass.

I imagine there are whole courses at J-schools to teach
aspiring journos how to recognize the magic moment when it’s time to engage in
a righteous ratf*cking of a dangerous pol.Maybe in the case of Trump critical mass was reached when angry and
worried journos received the 10,000th gut-churning anti-Semitic or racist tweet from Trump supporters.

If so, can't blame them too much. It's easy to advocate for dispassion and objectivity when you're puttering along on your little blog and not receiving a torrent of abuse, threats, and explicit targeting.

But the bottom line for me is, a license to practice one-sided
journalism creates, with alarming frequency, bad journalism.And when one-sided journalism melds with bad
journalism, you get journalism that readers simply tune out as just more
ratf*cking, not a precious Murrow moment.